On Thursday, May 29th at 7:30pm Black Mountain College alumna Jacqueline Gourevitch will speak about her time at the College (Summer 1950) and the evolution of her work as a painter. Gourevitch will exhibit ten paintings from her series Site Reconstruction at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville as part of its summer exhibition. This powerful set of small paintings reveals the area of downtown Manhattan around the World Trade Center site from an elevated point of view in #7 WTC. What we see is the WTC site under construction, often at night, from 2003-2011. The paintings give rise to a constellation of emotions associated with our experience of 9/11 and the tangled process of rebuilding.

Gourevitch describes her own feelings in this interview excerpt: “I’ve been here in Lower Manhattan since 1978 and was deeply affected by the events [of 9/11] in many ways. It’s my neighborhood. Like so many others I saw the towers destroyed right in front of my very eyes that morning. I watched it all from my roof up here. Having worked over there, ridden the elevators with all those other people and explored the many subterranean levels and subway connectors of that enormous complex made coming come to terms with what had happened very hard. It took time. It’s ongoing. All of that is true, and is now an indelible part of my experience. But I’m a painter and I’m a greedy looker. Looking and seeing are not passive activities. I have a hungry eye.

I was painting the traces of the destruction alongside the reconstruction. At some important level it was healing. I suppose I could have gone to Central Park and “turned my head around”. That’s not my way. I paint what I care and think about. A number of my paintings and watercolors show Ellis Island in the harbor, which is where I first started out in New York City. All of these associations play a role in these works and then there also is this pure visual impact of watching these immense towers rise, so unrelated to anything of human scale. What and how you feel about things shows up in how you paint them.”

Excerpted from an interview of Jacqueline Gourevitch by Stephanie Buhmann, February 8, 2013, Tribeca, New York. http://www.jacquelinegourevitch.com/